Idolatry eBook

Your womanish outburst of despairing tears over, a
hot fever of restlessness besets you. The space
is narrow for disquiet such as yours,—­you
hunt up and down the strip of floor like a caged beast.
No way out,—­no way out!—­Face
to face with lingering death, why not hasten it?
No moral scruple withholds you. Yet will you not
die by your own hand. Through all your suffering
you will cling to life and worship it. Never
will you open your arms to death,—­which
seems to you no grave, compassionate angel, but a
malignant fiend lying in ambush for your soul.
And such a fiend will your death be; for to all men
death is the reflection of their life in the mind’s
mirror.—­Still to and fro you fare, a moving
shadow through a narrow gloom, walled in with stone.

Awful is this unnatural sanity of intellect:
it is like the calm in the whirlwind’s centre,
where the waves run higher though the air is deadly
still, and the surly mariner wishes the mad wind back
again.—­To and fro you flit, goaded on and
strengthened by untiring anguish. You are but
the body of a man; your thought and emotion are abroad,
haunting the unconscious, happy lovers!—­

Suddenly you stop short in your blind walk, throw
up your arms, and break into an irrepressible chuckle.
Has your brain given way at last?—­No, your
laugh is the outcome of a genuine revulsion of feeling,
intense but legitimate. What is the cause of it?—­You
plunge into the rubbish-heap at one end of the room,
and grasp and draw forth the rickety old ladder which
has been lying there these twenty years. You
have seen it almost daily, poking out amidst the cobwebs,
and probably for that very reason have so long failed
to perceive that it was susceptible of a better use
than to be food for worms. You set it upright
against the wall; its top round falls three feet below
the horizontal aperture. Enough, if you tread
with care. Narrow, steep, and rickety is the
path to deliverance; but up! for your time is short.

Upward, with cautious eagerness! The ladder is
warped and rests unevenly, and once or twice a round
cracks beneath the down-pressing foot; the thing is
all unsound and might fall to pieces at any moment.
However, the top is gained, and your nervous hands
are on the sill at last. Easing yourself a little
higher, you look forth on the world once more.

Not so late after all! Red still lingers along
the western horizon, but against it is mounting and
expanding a black cloud, glancing ever and anon with
dangerous lightning. In a clear sky-lake above
the cloud, steadily burns a planet. The gentle
twilight rests lovingly on earth’s warm bosom—­

Hark! look! what moves yonder beneath the trees?—­

Your parched, eager face strained forwards, your hungry
eyes eating through the gloom,—­see emerge
from the avenue two figures, sauntering lover-like
side to side! How forgetful of the world they
seem! Little think they of you, of the rack on
which you have been outstretched. But their hour
has come. This moment shall be their last of
peace,—­their last of happy love.